Dirty Little Secret (18 page)

More likely, he had no place for negativity because he was too busy thinking, plotting out how to manipulate me next. I’d met Sam half a day ago, but already I knew when he wasn’t done with me.

I closed the door behind me. Only then did Sam’s truck start and move down the street.

As the noise faded, my alarm grew. I’d been so focused on Sam that I’d completely forgotten about my granddad. All the lights were on in the living-room-turned-showroom with shiny finished instruments hanging in rows from the ceiling. I was totally exposed with my bra straps showing—my shrug must have been behind Sam’s seat, crushed under two guitar cases—and I was holding my forbidden fiddle. I’d just taken great pains to walk away from the dangerous lure of my life’s goal, only to get busted.

But as I paused and listened, I heard my granddad snoring softly in his bedroom. I hadn’t asked him what my curfew was, if I had one, but it was way past midnight and he wasn’t waiting up for me.

I slipped off my boots at the bottom of the stairs so I wouldn’t wake him with my clomping. Then I walked into the kitchen and opened the pantry. My grandmother’s mason jars were still there, though she hadn’t been alive to can tomatoes from the garden in ten years. I unscrewed the lid of one, opened my fiddle case to extract my share of the night’s wages, and plopped the bills inside, where they unrolled and expanded against the glass. It seemed like a fittingly redneck place to keep the money from a rockabilly band.

I lugged my boots and fiddle and the jar to the top of the stairs. In my room, I slid the jar onto the dresser, collapsed on the bed,
and stared at the money. It was
so much money
. I’d made it all from playing my fiddle for two hours. I couldn’t quite believe it.

Yet Julie with her high-powered contract made that much money every second.

I stayed in that strange in-between place for a long time, wanting to be ecstatic that I was a professional musician, not wanting to be jealous of Julie, saddened all over again that the two always walked hand in hand. I thought about hiding the jar in a drawer so I wouldn’t see it constantly and feel that wash of jealousy over and over again. But the sense of accomplishment was too good and too strong. When I received my first paycheck from the mall next week, I could deposit it in my bank account, but I knew I would cash it and stow it in the mason jar like an idiot hiding money in the mattress, just so I could see it.

And I knew that, angry as I was at Sam, and much as he probably hated me right now, we would be playing with each other again tomorrow.

Pulling my music notebook and colored pencils from my purse, and rubbing my eyes to my heart’s content, I sat down at the desk and wrote a song about that.

8

The next afternoon,
my granddad and I rocked in chairs on his front porch, lazily playing our instruments. He strummed along with me, agreeing to whatever sleepy oldie popped into my head, while I tried to enjoy the sound of my fiddle, the touch of the bow against the strings, the way those sounds seemed like a natural accompaniment to a breezy summer day.

I tried and failed. I played songs as familiar to me as my own fingers, but different possibilities cropped up stubbornly in my mind, places these tunes were never intended to go. I could add a seventh to the bass line in my head. I could slide from a bluegrass tune straight into a startlingly similar R & B standard. I was awake and alert and out of my comfort zone. Sam had done this to me.

“Phone’s ringing,” my granddad said.

I stopped fiddling and listened and sure enough heard my Alison Krauss ringtone, faintly. At least my granddad wasn’t in danger of losing
his
hearing anytime soon.

“Probably Sam,” he added unnecessarily.

I gripped my fiddle tightly to keep from flinging it away as I jumped up from my chair, leaving it rocking wildly. I ran through
the showroom, dashed up the stairs, and shoved my hand into my purse. But the number on my phone wasn’t labeled.

Not Sam.

“Hello?” I snarled.

“Hey!” a girl said brightly. “It’s Charlotte.”

I felt my nostrils flair in distaste.

“Cunningham,” she added when I didn’t say anything. “The drummer.”

“Uh-huh.” Whatever message she’d called to deliver, I was going to make it as difficult as possible for her. “How did you get my number?”

“Sam asked me to convince you to come back to the band.”

“I was never in your band,” I said.

“Whatever. Sam is mad at me. He thinks you dropped out because of what I did last night. I just wanted to apologize. I shouldn’t have dragged Ace back to Sam’s truck and opened the door. I knew what was happening, but you’re a big girl, and I should have just let it happen. And I didn’t mean what I said.” Her tone was super-friendly and, therefore, ironic, just like last night.

I started to rub my eye, then quickly pulled my hand away. Charlotte wasn’t worth rubbing my eyes over. “Yes, you did mean it,” I told her. “Girls don’t say ‘This guy is making out with you like he just made out with me’ without meaning it. That’s pretty specific.”

“Well.” Stumped, she took a deep breath. “Look, I wasn’t trying to be rude. I just felt like you should know what was going on. Sam has had a different girlfriend every week this year. He has literally had, like, fifty-two girlfriends. He wears his heart on his sleeve. He will make you feel like the world was made for the two of you while he’s with you. He’ll convince you to do anything he wants, and he’ll make you think it was
your
idea. With Sam, two
and two doesn’t always equal four. Depending on what he’s trying to convince you of that day, two and two might equal five. He’s so convincing that sometimes he seems like he doesn’t know himself that he’s manipulating you.

“And then, when he’s gotten what he wants out of you, it’ll be over. You’ll be having the week of your life, and out of the blue he’ll say”—she switched into a lower voice that was supposed to be Sam’s—“‘I’m messed up right now, and I can’t give you what you deserve.’ And then he’s on to girl fifty-three. Wait, this isn’t convincing you to come back to the band, is it?”

I let the silence fall between us, like a security gate rolling shut over a storefront at the mall. Surely she could hear how passive-aggressive she sounded. But as the seconds dragged on, I decided she might be so socially inept that she
didn’t
understand her own passive-aggression, or the meaning behind my silence. I said, “I don’t know what your plans are for higher education, but you should probably rule out law school.” I hung up.

The triumphant feeling lasted about two seconds, and then I was alone in the quiet room that wasn’t really mine, listening to the breeze in the oak trees outside, staring at the phone in my hands and feeling numb.

I was determined to stay strong and put an end to my relationship, such as it was, with Sam. From the very beginning, I’d suspected him of something like what Charlotte had described. It was hard to turn my back on him. Better now than later, when his claws had sunk further into me.

But I couldn’t help a little flight of fancy, the memory of his hands on me. I put one hand up to cup my breast and thought of the way he’d touched me. The most endearing thing about him had been the way he seemed bowled over by me, like he’d never met a girl so sexy and beautiful. Was it good to treasure the memory of a
few perfect hours together? Or would I have been better off never meeting him?

I wasn’t getting married, but I was as bad off as that girl Sheila at the bar last night, marrying David and thinking of Sam while she stared at the ceiling.

There was definitely a country song about this.

I pried my hand away from the phone and galloped back downstairs to my granddad. We had just launched “Wildwood Flower” when he said, “Phone’s ringing. Y’all can’t bear to stay away from each other?”

“Nope.” It was probably Charlotte again. It definitely wasn’t Sam. Even if it
was
Sam, I wasn’t excited about talking to him. Yet strangely, I made it up the stairs in record time. The number wasn’t labeled. Not Sam. “Fuck,” I said, then clicked the phone on. “Hello?”

“Hello, Bailey. It’s Ace.”

I sighed heavily, directly into the phone so he would hear it, and didn’t say anything.

After the silence stretched on, he added, “Hightower. The bass player. From last night?”

“Hello, Ace,” I said, letting him know from my tone that I understood why he was calling, and it wasn’t going to work. But even as I unleashed that sarcastic barb, my voice faltered. I thought I heard Sam singing, like he was serenading me. I walked over to my windows. Nothing was beneath them but grass dappled with sun and shade.

“Listen,” Ace said. “Sam asked me to convince you to play with us again tonight. We’re all so sorry about what Charlotte said to you. She and Sam dated before, but it was nothing serious. Just a week. She’s not quite over him, I think—”

“You think?” I interjected.

Ace went on as if I hadn’t interrupted. “—and she wanted me to drive back to the parking deck last night and find you with him. I knew I shouldn’t have done it, but I did it, and I’m sorry.”

I couldn’t concentrate on a snappy comeback. I still thought I heard Sam, and he was drowning out Ace’s apology. It was like talking to Julie every night for the past year, asking her to repeat herself again and again over the din of the entourage surrounding her. “Where are you?”

He paused between it’s-none-of-your-business and what-would-it-hurt-to-tell-her. “Broadway.”

“Sam’s singing on Broadway?” I exclaimed. He’d finally gotten the gig he wanted! And he hadn’t needed me after all. My heart raced with elation and pain together.

“Oh,” Ace said. He realized that I could hear Sam, and he should have walked to Georgia to make this call. “Well, he’s busking.”

“What?” I exclaimed. Lots of musicians hung out between the clubs on Broadway, playing whatever instrument they had with their cases open for passersby to throw bills into. Usually these people looked only marginally better groomed than the man who had almost grabbed me last night. “Why is Sam busking?”

“He does this a lot,” Ace admitted. “If he doesn’t have a gig, he makes one.”

This I had to see. And hear. “I’m coming down there.” As my words popped out, I was inching closer to giving in to Sam’s demand that I play with his band. At the very least, I was giving away how far I’d fallen for him. But no matter what, I was not going to miss the spectacle of Sam busking.

“You can’t come down here.” Ace almost sounded like he was having an emotion, and it was desperation. “You saw how he was last night. He needs to be focused when he sings. Fights with girls mess that up.”

Nice. Way to make me feel special. “I’ll be secret,” I said. “I won’t let him see me.”

“You’re hard to miss,” Ace said. “No. I shouldn’t have told you where he is. He’s already mad at me, Bailey. Come on.”

“See you there.”

My granddad must have assumed that a second date with Sam was inevitable. He accepted it without complaint. I slid my fiddle from the seat of my rocking chair, buckled it into its case, and took it with me, hoping that it looked natural. When my granddad eyed me suspiciously, I told him I wasn’t sure what Sam and I were going to do that night, but we might jam together. It was true.

Preferring not to park in a dark parking deck by myself, even though it was still daylight, I trolled the upper part of the hill near Broadway for a space. It wasn’t long before I spotted Sam’s old truck in a pay lot. Behind it sat not Ace’s minivan from last night but a brand-new SUV with the Hightower car dealership insignia on the back. I stopped behind that.

With my fiddle case in one hand and my purse slung over my shoulder, I stepped out of my car in high heels, stylish shorts, and a crazy blouse layered with necklaces. Broadway was exposed to the slanting sun, and my usual Goth-wear was heavy for this heat. But if wearing shorts took some of my power away, I hoped the killer heels gave it back.

As I reached the corner and scanned Broadway down the hill, I headed for the biggest crowd. I could picture Sam drawing a crowd all alone with his guitar. As I moved closer, I didn’t hear him playing or singing, yet nobody in the crowd was moving on down the sidewalk like they’d heard enough. They were staying put. I could picture Sam convincing people to stay put.

I tried to push through to reach him and show him I wanted to play with him before he started his next song. That would smooth
over everything we’d said to each other the night before. I wouldn’t give in and join his band. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t start a relationship with him, either, if he asked. That was crazy. But we could play on Broadway every Sunday afternoon for a while, until Julie got famous and somebody recognized me as her sister. Before that happened, I would get my fix of playing with him. We would do fine if we could just play together and never had to speak.

But before I could find a hole in the crowd, the strains of his mellow acoustic guitar glided above the heads of the crowd. I would have thought from the intro and the chord progression that he was attempting Alan Jackson’s “Remember When,” which was in G, but he was in C.